Customer Reviews

Conversations Before the End of Time

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I found her choices of who she interviewed to well-round her theme (Leo Castelli, The Guerrilla Girls, those who study human behavior, environmentalists, etc.) Leo Catelli developed his fame with avant-garde artists. Artists which could be labeled as aesthetic artists. Castelli discusses the 1993 Whitney Biennial as a change of guard between aesthetic art and a more social art. Sure there are gray areas. What is avant-garde today? Does it exist today? Are we borrowing from those before us more than ever?
In this book, thoughtful people explore questions that the comfortable and apathetic will not. Questions about squeezing everything out of everything.....art, the environment, community.... She brings out how most art is for only a select and priviledged few due to the way Western Cilvilization exists now.
Some of the views might seem a bit extreme, but after all, it is the extremists on both sides who shape the future. Suzi Gablik interjects that the strongest(industrial/polluting/rich) extremists might be winning today. I think this book suggests that some artists are saying we should care about each other by connecting more closely to each other and the resources we live with.
Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, the Bauhaus school and many other thinkers stated these similar things some 90 years ago.
This book restates this modified theme today. This is a very important book.

Suzi Gablik promises a thoughtful collection of discussions with various artists and critics regarding the relationship of art with life and spirituality. Unfortunately, in each section (the book is written in dialogue form) she directs the conversation towards her own personal extreme apocolyptic environmental worldview.

In those dialogues where the participant agrees with her viewpoint, they happily conclude that a highly politicized, non-traditional art world is the desired aim. But in those conversations where the participant doesn't happen to see the Earth on the verge of environmental breakdown, the conversation seems to break down. Gablik seems so entrenched within this worldview that she is unable to understand other views.

In one instance, a critic used as an example the changes that we have undergone in the development from a society of hunter-gatherers to our present modern society. He made the seemingly obvious point that today our immediate survival is not as at risk now as it was when each day's food depended on that day's hunt.

Gablik seemed shocked that he did not see the Earth on the verge of an environmental apocalypse, meaning that she feels that our immediate survival is very much at risk.

This is not even a the classic liberal versus conservative argument regarding the role of art and aesthetics. That dialogue would have been productive. Rather, the author consistantly focuses on her own personal biases, leading to disappointing results.

Suzi Gablik's Conversations Before the End of Time is a collection of interviews with artists and others about the human caused ecological crisis currently taking place on this planet and in particular the reaction in the art and intellectual world to this crisis. It is not easy to talk about this subject, and some may find this book disturbing for that reason. Contemplating our own individual mortality is difficult enough, and that is done in a cultural context that supports the process and imbues it with meaning. A good deal of the meaning in personal mortality comes from the fact that there will be posterity. The End of Time postulated in Gablik's book is unthinkable because it precludes this meaning. The format of the book and Gablik's choice of subjects for her interviews carry out the purpose of the book beautifully. I found the interview with Christopher Manes on Homo-centrism of art to be particularly enlightening. How can we appreciate the magnitude of our destructive actions if all we talk about is ourselves?

This book confirms an observation of mine; that contemporary art is the expression of a politically liberal world view, deeply pessimistic about humanity, and driven by an unwitting self-loathing. I'm sorry she and her friends see things this way. Much of our world is created by the way we view it. This Gablik creation is dark indeed. I would have much greater sympathy if it wasn't so self-inflicted. The world is what you make it.